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On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations
declared genocide a crime under international law. On December
9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution
260A(III), the Convention on the Preservation and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide, which obliged “Contracting
Parties” to “undertake to prevent and to punish
… acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethical, racial, or religious group.”

Just as a state’s police swear to prevent and punish murder, so
the signers of the Genocide Convention swore to police a brave
new world order.

Preface

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a
population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program
of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the
killing was low-tech—performed largely by
machete—it was carried out at a dazzling speed: of an
original population of about seven and a half million, at least
eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred
days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be
right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the
rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most
efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.

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In mid-December of 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright delivered a speech to the Organization of African Unity
in Addis Ababa in which she said, “We, the international
community, should have been more active in the early stages of
the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they
were—genocide.” Albright, who would be making a
brief visit to Rwanda during her tour of Africa, also condemned
the use of humanitarian aid “to sustain armed camps or to
support genocidal killers.” Simple words—but
politicians dislike having to say such things; that same month,
in New York, I heard a senior emissary of the UNHCR sum up the
experience of the Hutu Power controlled camps in Zaire with the
formulation, “Yes, mistakes were made, but we are not
responsible.”

…

His stop there was brief—he never left the
airport—but it was highly charged. After listening for
several hours to the stories of genocide survivors, Clinton
forcefully reiterated Albright’s apologies for refusing to
intervene during the slaughter, and for supporting the killers
in the camps. “During the ninety days that began on April
6, 1994, Rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this
blood-filled century,” Clinton said, adding, “It is
important that the world know that these killings were not
spontaneous or accidental…they were most certainly not
the result of ancient tribal struggles…These events grew
from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a
people.” And this mattered not only to Rwanda but also to
the world, he explained, because “each bloodletting
hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and
violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more
conceivable.”

Clinton’s regrets about the past were more convincing than his
assurances for the future. When he said, “Never again
must we be shy in the face of the evidence” of genocide,
there was no reason to believe that the world was a safer place
than it had been in April of 1994. If Rwanda’s experience could
be said to carry any lessons for the world, it was that
endangered peoples who depend on the international community for
physical protection stand defenseless. On the morning of
Albright’s visit to Rwanda in December, Hutu Power terrorists,
shouting “Kill the cockroaches,” had hacked,
bludgeoned, and shot to death more than three hundred Tutsis at
an encampment in the northwest, and in the days before Clinton’s
arrival in Kigali, as many as fifty Tutsis were killed in
similar massacres. Against such a backdrop, Clinton’s pledge to
“work as partners with Rwanda to end this violence”
sounded deliberately vague.